Sunday, March 18, 2012

Alien revisited... 30 years later

Ridley Scott's forthcoming Prometheus finally has a trailer - see here on io9:

I don't like horror movies but I love Alien, the first and second-best movie in the Aliens franchise. The reason I don't think of it as horror is because it's not supernatural and not particularly gory (Noodle interruptus alien birth notwithstanding). More than that, Alien, like Aliens, is thoroughly believable in the way it looks. Like the ambience in Firefly, I truly buy that the crew members live and work on that ship, with the same day-in day-out banter and boredom that eventually comes with any job. The characters and the sets create a world I can fall into, regardless of the plot.

An offshoot of the new movie is the Weyland Industries site. Weyland created the androids Ash and Bishop as well as the (alarmingly unstable) atmosphere processors from Aliens, and apparently a great many other innovations for space travel as well. In cut scenes from Aliens you see their logo on the colony buildings. Otherwise, the company is never actually mentioned by name - it's the ubiquitous "Company" in both the first and second movie, represented by the bland Ash and blander Burke and their nefarious plans.

(In a cool bit of metamoviemagic, the URL www.prometheusmovie.com redirects to the Weyland Industries site.)

About Me

My first science fiction novel, Song of Scarabaeus, was published in 2010 by HarperVoyager and was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Aurealis Award for Best SF Novel. Children of Scarabaeus is the sequel.
www.saracreasy.com
saracreasy@gmail.com